| I'm an SAP guy. I've been a developer, architect, and now a manager of sorts. I'm not necessarily a fan of SAP but SAP has certainly earned my respect. ERP provides stability through support. ERP provides common ground so you can speak with other companies, partner with 3rd parties, and easily hire people with knowledge of your system. ERP provides standard interfaces for slapping together more ERP tools. ERP provides security models, governance models, and provides the means for meeting industry specific compliance requirements. SAP in particular (and all ERPs to some extent) provide a shockingly massive amount of business logic. They facilitate a vast array of industries, business processes, and provide a robust system for tracking your business data in a semi-stable/rational way. Where SAP in particular has gone wrong is that they're entrenched in their own proprietary technology. They're victims of their own highly successful code base and cannot easily get out from under it. They'll lose eventually but whether it takes them 10, 20, or 100 years to lose remains to be seen. I'm a developer at heart and I can say, with confidence, that I would rather spend money on SAP than build a home grown system knowing full well the mess that SAP is. With the right team (i.e. damn good developers with industry experience) I could probably build something better and I've talked to a few people about it in the past but you are talking a true uphill battle from both a technology and a sales perspective. Having said that, if anyone feels the need to take on the ERP space, feel free to contact me as I'm certainly not adverse to the idea. I've thought about it plenty and there are definitely attack vectors available. |